Jack N Jill

Manju Warrier in the Bharatha Natyam attire and beating up bad guys with absolute swag is something that looks pretty appealing on paper. The only thing that I can say as a positive about Santosh Sivan’s horrendously lousy directorial Jack N Jill is that there is a good possibility that some filmmakers might consider making an action thriller with Manju Warrier as the protagonist. With a lazily written script that seems to be clueless about its target audience, Jack N Jill is you doing facepalm at regular intervals of time.

Keshavan, aka Kesh, is a well-known name in the world of AI research. He has created his own humanoid named Kuttaps. After getting world recognition, Kesh comes back to his home for further experiments, and for that, he needs a human subject. What all happens in his quest for a human subject to conduct the Jack N Jill experiments is what we see in this movie.

The Foundation of any good movie is a solid script with clarity and freshness. Even though the movie has this outlook of being a sci-fi film, the core is an outdated revenge plot that never looks appealing. The whole Jack N Jill SciFi stuff is a hollow suit that feels lackluster from the word go. Even movies that are intended for small kids have a coherent plot, making some of the classics worthy of a rewatch despite being pretty simplistic. That originality is not there in Jack N Jill.

Parvathy is a character that exhibits various moods, and in that sense, there is something here for Manju Warrier to perform. And as I said in the beginning, Santosh Sivan has designed certain setpieces keeping in mind the image of Manju Warrier, which are thankfully the moments of relief in this film. Kalidas Jayaram delivers a bland performance as Kesh. Soubin Shahir was annoying as the eccentric humanoid Kuttaps. Shaylee Krishen had no purpose in the story, and her dubbing worsened things. Aju Varghese and Basil Joseph are the typical comic reliefs. Late actor Nedumudi Venu is there as the stereotypical grandfather. Sunil Varghese and Gokul Anand as the antagonists were unintentionally funny. Esther Anil, Indrans, and a few more names are there in the star cast.

The kind of low production values and the broad-stroke writing you get to see in this movie makes it extremely difficult to believe that it is a movie conceived by a man who made gems like Urumi and Anandabhadram. Jack n Jill is super lazy in terms of writing, and at no point would you feel that it was an exciting concept that got ruined due to bad writing. The humanoid concept is left alone after a point, and the movie goes after a cliched revenge space. The music was poor (I was never a fan of that Kim Kim song). Santosh Sivan’s usage of the mirror in frames is something signature of his style, and here he makes a mockery of his own style by throwing mirrors here and there.

I had a really tough time sitting through this wannabe Desi Lucy. At one point, the main character Keshavan talks about the fact that we are not using the full potential of our brain. But they have made a movie that completely disrespects anyone with a functional brain.